The advent of the Internet and cyberspace has created a virtual world. In many respects, former limitations regarding time and geographic location no longer apply. One can access the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and from anywhere in the world where there is an Internet access point. In addition, the proliferation of mobile devices such as laptop computers, personal digital assistants, phones with web-browser capabilities, USB memory devices and other portable devices such as the iPod from Apple, many of which possess wireless communications capabilities, removes the physical grounding of access to the Internet. With all of these opportunities for access anytime and anywhere, the uses and implementations of Internet-based operations has flourished. The access to account information, vendors, shopping, etc., has benefited today's society.
That is not to say, however, that this access from anywhere at any time does not come with some price. Accessing of sensitive personal information by those who are not authorized to possess this information is a risk. The number of incidents of identity theft, theft of proprietary or confidential information and phishing expeditions has been increasing.
An increasingly mobile work force, using smaller devices and having wireless access, has significantly increased the opportunities for proprietary or confidential information to fall into the wrong hands at the wrong location.
In the past, access to information had a “built-in” geographic component, in that only systems or terminals that were physically connected to a network gained access. Of course, the use of password and access protocols assured, to some extent, that only authorized users obtained access. Wireless and remote access, however, removes this “built-in” feature.
Many methods and systems have been proposed to control access to resources as a function of a location of a requesting user or application. It is known to use the position of a requestor as identified by a Global Positioning System (GPS) signal that is provided with a request. Rules or policies are put into place to control access to a particular resource such that a request coming from one geographic location would not be honored, whereas the same request, if received from a second geographic location, would be allowed because of compliance with the relevant policy.